Virginia and New Jersey were among the states to hold elections for their state legislatures this past Election Day. The results from Virginia, in particular, have been called surprising, but of all contested state legislature seats between the two states, partisanship predicted over 92 percent of the winners.

On June 20, in a special election for Georgia’s 6th house district Karen Handel defeated Jon Ossoff, ending a campaign that had started almost the moment the 2016 campaign had ended. The whole country seemed to be paying attention to the first big contested race in the Trump era, which was portrayed as a precursor to 2018 congressional elections. In the end, the race was negative and grueling--with one of the final ads associating Ossoff with an “unhinged left” that endorsed the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise. But it didn’t have to be.

When I was 14, I had my first experience with ranked choice voting (RCV). I was a freshman in high school in San Francisco, and we used it to elect my student body representatives. Given the city of San Francisco had been using RCV for every city election for nearly nine years, I was excited to be using it for our school elections. I saw it as a fair system that ensured the winners would have to appeal to larger portions of the student body in order to get elected. At the time, I was sure it would only be a few years before RCV was adopted in cities and states all over the US.